Misused: Doing It For The Art

I was just looking at this article and a massive amount of its examples are basically Gushing About Shows You Like. In my opinion the article should be about a whole work being made for the art, but now it seems to be "creators putting a nice (and undefined) amount of effort in something" which includes attention to detail, good lore, and other stuff: basically what the person that added the example really liked about said work.

I deleted some of examples but I am lazy don't know every show/game/book/movie/etc that is mentioned there. I propose a cleanup (I think a sectionectomy would be too much because there must be some valid examples between all the gushing)

edited 19th May '12 8:27:21 PM by Anfauglith

Instead, I have learned a horrible truth of existence...some stories have no meaning.

Bump. I recommend either cutting all the offending examples or (if no one wants to cut them) making two types for this trope, one where all the work is done for the art and the other for only parts of it. I lean heavily towards the first option though, because I think the presence of examples for the second option devalue this trope, and would rather fit into The Dev Team Thinks of Everything, Scenery Porn, Visual Effects Of Awesome, and so on.

Instead, I have learned a horrible truth of existence...some stories have no meaning.

I honestly have no idea what's wrong with this page as it is.

I honestly have no idea what's not wrong with this page as it is.

What would be a good, non-misuse example of Doing It for the Art?

I think what we need to do is change the focus of this from gushing about works, to In-Universe motivation for artists. One is speculation. The other is a trope. That's where the current crop of examples lie anyway so the change wouldn't be that hard.

edited 26th Jun '12 12:23:22 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

That's workable, and the in-universe examples are already neatly set off in their own section.

Whatever the hell the creator of Cerberus (The aardvark comic) was doing. He certainly wasn't doing it for profit.

edited 26th Jun '12 7:13:19 PM by Scardoll

Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.

Yes, but that's still just guessing and speculation that it's this behind it. This could be perfectly solid as an In-Universe trope, but anything beyond that is pure speculation.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

That it contains incorrect gushing.

Yes, the Transformers are detailed, but that movie was not Made For The Art.

Basically everything that could be catalogued as "attention to detail" or something similar gets labelled as Doing It for the Art by the fans of whatever work it is.

Look at this videogame entry:

I didn't play this game, but this is just hyperbolic hogwash. You like the story, great, but it does not mean the game was Made For the Art...

—

All in all, if instead of gushing it had contained some negativity, the page would have been stripped of examples, moved to Darth Wiki, and then lit on fire.

As for fixing the article, restricting the examples to In Universe would be fine for me. 'Tis less work than cleansing the examples and leaving only the true ones (plus there's a lot of room for YMMV there).

edited 26th Jun '12 8:53:51 PM by Anfauglith

Instead, I have learned a horrible truth of existence...some stories have no meaning.

If we don't make this in-universe, we might want to remove all examples where the author hasn't come out and directly stated "I didn't make this this for profit".

We might want to do that anyway, if we keep a Real Life section.

So basically, any out-of-universe examples have to be confirmed by Word of God. That's a good standard.

Yeah. I definitely think this sort of thing happens in real life, but otherwise it just becomes a gush-fest and it's hard to tell when an author was just making it solely for "the art". Most authors, at least to some degree, like writing — hence the reason they chose to become an author — even if they have some monetry gains.

edited 27th Jun '12 10:47:58 AM by MangaManiac

Wow, this has way too many examples. Might be faster to cut them all and re-add them one by one rather than the other way around.

Just because you're the fastest doesn't mean the rest of us doesn't have the patience.

Anyway, a lot of these examples add to the actual value of the work, which means it has a better chance to do well commersially. Sure, technically, everything has some measure of Doing It for the Art, but I think it's only worthwhile to have examples where details are added or researched when a viewer or reader wouldn't notice it without an in-depth analysis, or have access to behind the scenes inormation.

A large of this could be simply For The Fans, such as much of the detail in the Lord Of The Rings movies. Only true fans (for any given value) would actually realise that the language was correct, or that the equipment had high quality. On the other hand, there were also lots of details that was never seen in the movies, like insignias or personal equipment for soldiers who were never seen in more than wide action shots. That's for the art, as I see it.

The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.

For The Fans may well be its own trope. If you're doing it to keep fans happy, you aren't really doing it for the art, are you?

I mean sure, there's overlap, but they're different. I'd say the author who wrote the languages to begin with was doing it for the art - the director who adhered to it was doing it For The Fans or Out Of Reverence.

Clocking due to lack of activity.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

Locking.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.